Month: April 2015

This week has been hell. My head was wrapped in cotton, my throat hurt so bad that I couldn’t sleep and when I got up to get a glass of water I felt so exhausted as if I’d just run a Marathon by the time I made it to the kitchen. I’ve been sick.

And it isn’t just me. Everyone around here is sick, from my sister to her boyfriend – and even my dogs have started throwing up. The only person still standing (and currently holding the fort at the office) is Sascha. He apparently has gone and gotten himself a flu shot last fall.

Was it the flu shot?

I know there is some controversy over whether flu shots really work. It’s very possible that the shot is not the reason why everyone got sick except for the one person in the office that got it. Maybe it’s pure coincidence. Maybe Sascha’s immune system was somehow able to ignore everyone spraying their germs at him. Or maybe it’s his love and abuse of hand sanitizer.

I would like to see if it’s possible to make Game Tower a game that can be played without a needing tutorial.

It’s not that I would shy away from implementing one. But when I pick up a game, I would like to start actually playing it right away. So this is an experiment I will try. There’s two plans of attack I have for this: Giving the player more features only over time and a Tip Of The Day.

Tip of the Day

I like loading screen-tips in games, because I can easily ignore them when I don’t want them. A tutorial forces me to click at a sequence of buttons in a specific order and is much more restrictive. That is fine for other games, but feels like overkill for such a simple game like Game Tower.

More coder art for your enjoyment! Ok, I know that this is bad, even by my standards. But my plan is to get the entire game done and working. Then I can see to it that the graphics are replaced by someone with actual talent.

So I created this quick’n’dirty Splash Screen and a Tip of the Day database. A random tip is displayed every time the game is started. The game will load the player’s tower in the background while the screen is displayed. There is a minimum display time of 4 seconds, to give the user a chance to read it even if the loading is done faster.

Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master

Probably everybody has heard of Bushnell’s law, that good games are easy to learn and difficult to master. The actual quote is a bit longer and also mentions rewarding the player (here is an interesting blog post about it). But I’ll stick with the short-hand version for now.

Applying that to my no-tutorial experiment, it should be possible to make the game easy enough in the beginning that there is no need for a tutorial before the player can start actually playing. I will have to do some more trial-and-error testing, but my current plan is to provide the player with three basic floors instead of an empty tower at game start. That way he can immediately jump in and start producing games, rather than worrying about building the correct floors, hiring people etc. Essentially I want the player to learn the core gameplay first – and then get into the finer details as he levels up.

The level-up design should come in really supportive here as well. Since the player unlocks more departments and larger game designs by leveling up, the complexity of the game already starts out small and grows larger over time.

If at first you don’t succeed…

…make sure you don’t blindly ignore if something is just not working.

Making Game Tower playable without a tutorial is something I want to try. But I won’t stick to it like it’s set in stone. If in the end I discover that the absence of a tutorial makes the game to confusing, I will mark the experiment as failed and provide a tutorial. After all, the game is meant to be played.

P.S.: I am also playing around with different names. That’s why that screenshot reads “Game Studio Manager” instead of “Game Tower”.